 Now while I frequently for our businesses our business clients use genuine neck gate devices running PF sense when we set them up The reason being it's easy to deploy. It's easy to keep a spare on a shelf like this one right here Just a basic spare if I need to download a config and put it in there I have things at the ready to replace them. That's great And I know that there's going to be a hundred percent compatibility and that's wonderful as well But what if you have special use cases or you go? Hey, I got this HP ProLiant ML 110 G7 Just sitting around collecting dust. What should I do with it build a custom PF sense with it? I am all four people who want to custom build things and tinker people think that I push only for that It depends on whether or not it's a business use case a special use case But you want to have things at the ready and maybe you have five of these at the ready And that's a good use case as well, especially for internal IT teams going I don't want to you know, have to go buy a piece of hardware I have these wonderful pieces of hardware that still have some life in them But aren't real productive for other things This particular ProLiant does have ECC memory in it a nice Intel Xeon processor We'll get a little bit more in specs later has a radar in it, which we're actually going to use and This has a special use case now the important part and one Yes, this is just a standard Intel build and Intel is well supported in the BST And therefore well supported with PF sense and you'll notice if you look at even the higher end net gate products They're all using Intel systems, but the network card choices This is where things can get a little bit tricky, but are very important if you want full features And what I mean by that is I don't just say get an Intel network card That's not quite specific enough and I'm going to show you how you figure out which network card to get And I'll show you which one we have right here So over on the free BST manual pages under alt-queuing and this is an easy way to start You want something that supports traffic shaping and a lot of other features on there So we can go over to the alt-queue list and then we go down here and we can look for the drivers Now the drivers on the particular board of this HP ML the card and the drivers that we'll be using are the EM It has two Intel network cards that fall under the EM name and you can go down Here's a list of I don't know exactly which ones are in here But you can see all the different drivers supported by the EM driver set and then you can see the features that are in there The second one the one that was in my hand the four port network card This is the Intel Quad port adapter so you got four on here and it doesn't just support alt-queue traffic shaping We go a step further and it Completely supports so you can see right here the IGV driver provide support for PC express gigabit ethernet adapters based on has a chipset names Furthermore it supports TCP segmentation offload all adapters identification LEDs adapters supported by a driver can be controlled via The LED API for localization purposes so you can pass through other commands for that if that matters to you jumbo frames etc and Let's take a little bit closer look at the card because hey it looks cool And when you're looking at it you notice it's not like your normal cheap like real tech cards You have these beefy heat sinks on there Well, that's the support it has for the hardware offloading to make sure it's had a cool And if it's routing and maybe you even go through and bond a couple of these together to make it even faster Or do any type of hardware offloading you want to make sure this is well supported So these cards are great I'll leave a link to the model number for here But you can see why that matters and this is where people sometimes have problems because they'll pick a card even though It's Intel and I'll say there are Intel cards that they do make that may not be supported fully in free BSD I believe the IX series don't have any traffic shaping support on there So a certain Intel cards are certain Intel cards not now this does matter much when it comes to your Built-in one on your motherboard because that's not where those high-level features are therefore. There is actually a difference between some of the server Network cards such as this versus the desktop ones that are gonna lack those features But those features are kind of irrelevant on the desktop side when it comes to just raw routing speed sure from a line-level speed Yes, we can route at a gig. That's not a problem where those issues come in like I say to you go Oh, I want to apply traffic shaping and hardware offloading that's for those big chips come in to actually Provide some horsepower back over to this machine here This has and it's not a rate array as in controlled by array controllers just controlled on the board But we happen to have and I just had these laying around just like this service laying around and three drives in here So how did I configure them? Well, that's a neat thing about PF sense It supports CFS and why would you need three hard drives in it for CFS three 500 gig drives? Well, this is actually gonna be built for one of my friends and he's going to be doing a lot of packet capturing a Lot of sniffing because he does all kinds of pen testing Yes, it's for Xavier for those of you that watch the channel and he needed something that would be able to do longer term Large packet captures right on the box be able to handle gigabit speed while doing IDS and just some general experimentation He does have a gig fiber connection And he needs something that can round it that fast and pack capture lots of packets So we got a couple different card options in here This will allow him to take different devices that he wants to further examine turn on full packet capture and not worry about running out Of space very quickly. I mean, of course, you could fill it up But you can capture a lot more than you can on a small little box And when you want to apply a lot of different filtering rules You want to be able to have you know that full hardware offload And there's some new things coming that I believe is not supported on all network cards It should be supported in this network card in the upcoming versions of siracada and upcoming 2.5 series of pf Sense so this adds a little bit of future for more tinkering that's going to be on there Now let's talk real quick about before we boot this up how you do zfs install I'm not going to walk you through the whole installer. I've got videos on that There's not much difference, but this is the part where you get to select zfs as a file system option for this So let's walk through that real quick. So when you get to the part where you're setting up the drive You're going to choose auto zfs then select pool type disk choose raid z1 Select the drives for the pool the three drives we have here and then just select proceed with installation and From there the system will go and have you all set up and configured For zfs and go through the normal install process. So pretty straightforward there. So I'm going to button this up real quick And let's turn it on I like hearing that sound. That's how I know even if there wasn't a screen connected It has sung the song of its people and it is booted. So now we can log into it here plug my laptop in I'm not even bothering putting a switch in for this. This is just directly connected to the interface So we can wait till it gets an IP address here on my laptop All right, and we can log into it All right. Now. I've already ran through the wizard and assigned a couple interfaces on this When in land I will leave the name the same I added two more interfaces This is that adding card that we put in the IGB zero IGB one and I could have called them anything I just called them that because I also have a sticker on the back that also matches. So whatever You want to plug these in you'll know exactly which interface you're plugged it into now this system is Running a the latest 2.44 p3 release. So depending on when you're watching this that is latest release as of right now Then we have the Intel Xeon CPU e31220 at 3.1 gigahertz And we do have the AES and I support for crypto and I know there's always this controversy But doesn't PF century quarter that with the new 2.5. No, they removed support for it But yes, it can help when you're doing Open VPN and AES and I support can help with the crypto support It is in many many chips as old as the system is it's in here Scroll down a little further. You see so much storage space with the ZFS drive. So let's log in real quick never to get us the stage turned on. So let's just SSH into this 8 and we'll go ZFS status oops List there we go had it wrong We can see right here showing the same thing. So we see all the drives and it's a pool status And you can see the raid Z pool online and all working perfectly fine now I don't really do much with the command line on ZFS on these you could snap shop before upgrade You could do some of those other features It's just kind of novel to be able to use ZFS and have it set up as a raid array When you want to have a few drives together and obviously I could have just striped them to make it one giant fast Array, but you know what if one of these older drives in here fail I just have these three five hundreds in here and I doubt he's gonna exceed that capacity one saving p-cap files But who knows you know it is obviously a possibility, but not too big of a deal now comes to memory four gigs of RAM Is that enough actually? Yes, even for us here at our office, which is many networks and as many vert instances so to speak because for each Interface you spin up another one of Seracada So you can watch that interface. We're not exceeding the four gigs of RAM So yes, that is adequate for this I see some people over build these systems and a much lesser system with much less horsepower will still route it gigabit Even with Seracada, this is even faster than what's needed. But hey, like I said the computer was just kind of laying around And Seracada also being multi-threaded the four CPU with four cores. That's fine That's enough to distribute it across your matter of fact for a little while This was actually in use here at our office as our main pfSense box when we were doing some testing and had it before we swapped over to The more recent video you may have seen With the SG-5100 which we currently use at our office, which by the way I believe this processor and this is even faster than that and it still has no problem routing it With Seracada and lots of mixed traffic But like I said, this was just a quick overview From here all the other things apply for setting this up for doing any of the other videos like I've done I've got videos on any individual thing that I'll link to I've got an entire getting started with and building out VLANs with this But I just want to show you know the use case There are plenty of special use cases and picking the network card. That's an important aspect because that's where people like Oh, no, it doesn't detect my card. What do I do? Do I have to load a bunch of drivers? Yeah, you could do that and I'm not I just don't bother loading extra drivers That can be a real pain in a butt then you update then get a little drivers again or some incompatibility Just going out and choosing like from the list I'll leave a link to below and finding a network card and like I said You can get this nice four-port card with full hardware offloading and everything and I've seen them going for between 30 and $40 Sometimes as much as 50 depends on the market supply of them And if you hunt around at some recycling place if you're lucky enough to be close to one That'll let you wander through there Sometimes you'll just have piles of them you can pick up for even cheaper or just you know find them around But go through that list find a good card that is supported out of the box It sees you the headache of loading drivers and by the way, you may have noticed in that list of for those wondering of can it do 10 gig Yes, absolutely. I can and yes, there are 10 gig ones in that list as well There's quite a bit of 10 gig support in BSD But be forewarned make sure it supports if you need this feature anyways I have a 10 gig card I was going to test as part of this video just to throw it in there and show it working But I realized it only wanted to work at 10 gig not at one gig It was one it was the driver support was kind of limited on there. So if you are hunting down a Different cards for that particular use case you may find that they do or don't work properly or fully inside of there Like I said use that as a reference guide for if you're doing the custom build, but have at it Like I said, we have a special use case. I In like this one here It's a definitely good way to repurpose some old hardware if you're on a budget building your home lab You want to dive in deep on pfSense and start really learning? I tell you finding use hardware that is I don't know what else to do with this thing like we had a few of these These are old servers we pulled out for a client that got new equipment It will servers slash kind of server But if you're looking for some deals on some hardware if you aren't lucky enough to have somewhere close We'll just have one laying around do reach out. We have an affiliate for tech supply direct We've sent people their way They do have a lot of slightly used servers that you guys are building on and build your custom pfSense for you can Find some that are you know somewhat budget friendly keep an eye out for deals on there And then our offer code and affiliate code gets you another 10% off and thanks